Posts Tagged general information

I’ve decided to return here for good. Some changes might happen though but they aren’t exacly definitive. I haven’t also explored what is new in terms of security and plugins to find if there is still interesting to be added to the site, but the basic that will happen from now on is;
1. Images won’t be added to galleries, unless I change my mood. They will posted individually, sometimes with a short description of anything relevant (where I got its name inspiration, how many time it took to render, etc), sometimes just with the name of the image. it’s too boring to add each image again, add a description, etc etc. Let the galleries for my old images. They might also be trimmed down at some point, removing images I don’t care much about them anymore. As I’ve said, there was a period of my “fractal life” where I was somehow compelled so to speak (by stupid group of users) to make a huge number of images in a short period of time (come on, you must be creative they said), and it became a job. with NO rewards. And 99% of the images didn’t satisfy ME. A couple (a dozen or more, actually) images that have been made in a year or so an posted in my FB page (that might or not have appeared here in the past) will be posted here as well. Actually, the FB page is… http://www.facebook/mundofractal/ (I guess), I’m not sure if you will be able to reach it from here.
2. The images won’t have a bookmark anymore most of the time, unless I find the image is a real “masterpiece”. If thieves want to steal it, they will. It’s quite easy and fast to add a watermark, but it’s even faster to cover it. The images won’t be posted anywhere else by me, I am not part of any digital community, forum or FB group. If they are posted without my usual internet nicknames (Mr. Mandelbrot, marcusbacus, fractallland, etc. etc….), they were probably stolen. Fuck that.
3. I have a Facebook page about it now as well just for posting images and a very small comment (a name or of the image and a line or so), but both here and FB have a giant annoyances to make you post stuff when you have made a few more images you like. Here I have a little more room to post and not care much if it is being sen or not (it is…), and the FB annoying “BOOST THIS IMAGE FOR JUST $5 TO GET MORE 10000 VIEWS in every single fucking post is really annoying, hence I’m trying to go back here. No, I don’t want to boost these posts neither make Mark more rich. Fractals is my hobby, not my income. Or his.
4. I might add an email account again (I lost my account where I registered my UF account so I can’t even get updates or re-registering my copy when I need an instalattion of my old registered – expensive! -copy of the updates since version 5 so I’m still using the v. 4something) just for dealing with any subject that might appear here – questions, comments that don’t fit in the comments page, and other random things. If it goes to a spam list, it’s gone.
5. I still am hating Apophysis. I am in a very very “old school” phase, so it will be more just very common spirals, midgets and some other popular images that will be the core of the next posts, I suppose. Eventually there will be a bit more abstract stuff like in the past, but I need inspiration.

6. It’s very sad to hear about Paul N. Lee’s passing and all his major fractal archive of softwares, tutorials, formulas being gone.

To make things more consistent I’ve finished renaming all the galleries, now they are called “Fractal Gallery XX” instead of just “Gallery”. The reason for this change is quite obvious when you think about searches in Google for fractals and image galleries. Also, another page for the galleries 21 to 30 was added to the main menu. It seems that it’s the preferred way to browse and find the images, as it’s not easy to go through all the posts to find the galleries, and the search and tags isn’t very precise (it’s not the right word though) at times and gives more results than you would like to visit if you are looking just for an image gallery. If a post is tagged with “image” or “fractal” or “gallery” (lots of posts have the first two tags) it will appear in the same search along with the actual gallery posts. Tags are really strange… I’ve also just found that in WordPress the tags for the images in the image galleries aren’t the same as tags used in posts and are in fact different entities, like for example the tag “abstract” that appears in a lot of images in the galleries, but it isn’t listed in my most used tags list. In fact, it has zero entries in posts, so making a search like “abstract fractal” won’t return any results… same happened with some other relatively important tags, like “3D/3-D”.

A few more entries added to the galleries menu in the front page, soon I’ll have them all listed there. Hopefully these will get as much attention as the single posts about my attempts with the Mandelbulbs. Sad, really. Mandelbulbs aren’t my cup of tea and will be restrained to these 2 images only (well not really just 2 images, I’ll be posting some Mandelbulbs here and there as I get how that thing works, but it will not be the main kind of fractal imagery you will find in here). Those who are looking for the Mandelbulbs here could at least have a look at the other galleries. I’ll stuck with Ultra Fractal and Fractint and the Mandelbulbs will be done just for fun, not because they are the latest trend. I can’t stand even Apophysis at the moment.

With the new layout I’m trying also some new thumbnail settings for the galleries. Now the thumbnails are set to 90 x 90 pixels (maximum) and are not taking into consideration the original proportion of the image, so some of these might look a bit strange. The galleries can have a custom number of columns, so the size of the thumbnails isn’t exactly a problem but I still have to find what’s the best combination with the 4-columns gallery layout. Also available are some different templates for the galleries, and some really don’t fit well with any theme and others seem to not have any noticeable changes. Another change was the number of images related to the post that are displayed in the small “footer” of the posts, now there are 10 images displayed. Clicking these will open the image(s) individually, not its gallery.

I think I’ll stay with this layout (Arclite) for a while. Still needs some small fixes but this seems to be a good one for a while. Some galleries might look a little messed up because of the width of the main content, I’ll fix that later. It ended up still keeping some blue, after all. Other colours didn’t really mixed well with the fonts, blue seems a more “natural” colour for the web. Maybe just a few tweaks in the font sizes and that’s it. Also there are options for custom logos in the header, but it’s not in the plans as I’ve said in the previous post.

Edit: as Michael Jackson would say, this is it. It’s working, looks OK, all it needs now is maybe a very few adjustments. All settings were mostly kept, which is nice. And the 16 images format for the gallery works.